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Mansfield QB Jack Moussette eludes Foxboro's Anton George in last year's holiday game.
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I really don't know what I'm going to do with myself on Thursday.
Since 1965 (with the exception of only a few years in the 1970s), for me, Thanksgiving Day has been a game day, or a work day, or both. But not this year.
I've been a Massachusetts resident for all my life, and part of that means having a devotion to high school football on the holiday. Not many states' schools play on the holiday, but for Bay Staters, football between traditional-rival schools has been part of the holiday experience almost since the Pilgrims stepped onto that rock in Plymouth. Many schools have reached the 100-game mark in recent years -- and if you watched my most recent video podcast, you will have learned that Attleboro and North Attleboro would have been playing for the 100th time on Thursday if not for the postponement of the entire season caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
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Mansfield and Foxboro briefly moved the game
to Schaefer Stadium in the early 1970s. |
My hometown team, the Mansfield Green Hornets, were to have played host to their rivals, the Foxboro Warriors, for the 90th time at Mansfield's Alumni Field. Not all of those games were played on the holiday; it wasn't until the 1940s when they decided to shift their annual game to the special holiday stage. But Hornets and Warriors of all ages don't pay much attention to that little fact.
Sadly, I would not have been there to see that game. As I have been a play-by-play announcer for the past two years since retiring from the newspaper, my duties would have taken me to Franklin High's Pisini Field to cover the 61st holiday meeting of the hometown Panthers and the King Philip Regional High School Warriors for North Attleboro Community Television's Plainville Channel.
But my attendance at the hometown game stopped being a regular thing about halfway through my career of 40-plus years at The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro. I've seen several Attleboro vs. North games, and in the last decade or so, I added King Philip vs. Franklin, Bishop Feehan vs. whomever they were playing (it's Bishop Stang currently), and Seekonk vs. Dighton-Rehoboth to my regular fare. And I've seen a few games played on alternate days by other schools because of weather postponements, so I'd like to think my appreciation of holiday football is not so myopic as to be tinged only in the green of my Green Hornets.
But this week? I'll be home, re-warming some Boar's Head sliced turkey and bottled gravy and opening a can of Ocean Spray jellied cranberries, and maybe crack open a Bitburger or two, for a Thanksgiving dinner of sorts. I probably won't even watch the crappy NFL games on the tube.
I must admit here, I've been less enthusiastic lately about the importance of Thanksgiving Day football. This state is embroiled in a perpetual battle between old-timers that resist change and the newbies that want a legitimate playoff format that doesn't include a mid-stream interruption such as Turkey Day football. I'll delve more deeply into that issue in another post, but let it suffice to say that while I am an old-timer, I see more hope for the future of football in Massachusetts through the playoffs.
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North TV's Peter Gay
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Still, I couldn't help but be touched nostalgically this week by memories of football games past. Peter Gay of North TV has been running a "Thanksgiving marathon" of televised AHS-North games since the 1990s, and I've watched several of them with interest. It's been fun to see some of the games I covered for the paper, and also to hear for the first time in its entirety the 2018 game I worked with the North TV crew in 10-degree cold from a riser some 50-60 feet above ground level at Attleboro High.
It's also been very poignant to hear the voice of Art Chase, the color analyst who left us far too soon. Art was Peter's long-time partner in the booth in all of the incarnations of local cable television that eventually led to North TV, and working together, those guys made it sound so easy -- something I kept in mind when I came on board years later.
I also rediscovered the archives of one of my other post-retirement stops, Foxboro Cable Access, which has an extensive library of past Mansfield-Foxboro games on YouTube. I covered quite a few of those games in the early 2000s and in my re-viewing of those, I could often spot myself on the sidelines, clinging to my huge Titleist golf umbrella (it rained heavily in many of those games) and trying to keep my notes dry.
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Writing a story in 1969. I still own the typewriter.
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Sadly, I didn't play football -- which probably still frosts a few people in regard to my induction into the Attleboro Area Football Hall of Fame a few years back. I wanted to, but my father was firm in his denial. He played for Mansfield High in his day, a skinny split end wearing No. 13, and during the fall of 1935, an opponent's foot to the nose forever altered his breathing, even after multiple surgeries. Years later, he looked at his skinny (yes, I was) and somewhat uncoordinated son and determined that football would be too risky for my health. Even my reminders that "they have face masks now, Dad," failed to sway him.
So instead of playing, I started keeping statistics. Then in the fall of 1969, my girlfriend shoved me through the front door of the weekly Mansfield News because she was tired of hearing me say that I could cover high school sports better than those that were doing it, and a sportswriting career was born.
As it turns out, my father was probably right. I suffered a severe injury to my left knee in 1974 while playing intramural football at Northwestern University -- and it took me until this past August to finally have it surgically repaired. Funny thing, I wasn't a bad pass rusher.
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Tony Farinella in 1935.
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Now, understand -- I don't resent my father's decision to keep me out of the game. I think he just lost interest in football of all sorts after suffering his injury. And the annual game against Foxboro didn't mean much to him either because his teams did not play the neighboring town on the holiday in the 1930s. His teams played Taunton, reflecting the competitive level of the Green and White in those days as opposed to that of their future foes from the other side of Robinson Hill.
But in 1967, Tony Farinella decided to engage in some male-bonding with his son, who was then 13 years old. I didn't have a ride to the Thanksgiving game to be played at the "new" Foxboro High on Mechanic Street (now the John J. Ahern Middle School), so he decided to bring me. It wasn't my first holiday game -- that had been two years earlier with the parents of a friend -- but I must admit, I thought it was cool that my father finally showed an interest in the sports of the high school I had just started attending as an eighth-grader.
But the football gods were not happy.
Weather forecasts for Thursday, Nov. 23, 1967, were for a heavy, cold rain -- and they did not disappoint. My father and I huddled together in the small, already-rickety stands on the visitors' side of the field (surprisingly so, given that the school was only three years old) and tried to stay warm as the precipitation fell. He would occasionally excuse himself to stroll over to the concession stand behind the end zone to get multiple cups of hot coffee, but I declined the offer for hot chocolate, fearing that my bladder would betray me as there were no restrooms within reasonable walking distance.
I probably should have been similarly worried for my 48-year-old father, but I figured that adults had greater powers of fluid retention.
The game itself was unremarkable. Mansfield lost by a 13-6 score, the heavy rain turning the center of the grass field into a muddy quagmire and bogging down the Hornets' powerful rushing attack. Later, it was learned that several of the players from both teams had suffered painful skin irritation resembling burns from the lime used for the yard markers. Apparently it was the wrong kind of lime, and when it interacted with the heavy rain, it caused a chemical reaction that left several Warriors and Hornets suffering for several weeks.
When the game ended, my father and I started walking the long distance down Chestnut Street to our Volkswagen Beetle. We were both drenched and miserable and my dad wanted to walk at a fast pace, seeming to be in considerable discomfort, but he didn't say why. And when we got to the car and started driving the back roads into Mansfield, he started squirming in his seat and moaning in a manner I had never heard from him before.
I was scared. "Dad," I said, "what's wrong?"
"I've got to pee," he said.
I remember beating back an urge to laugh out loud because when I was a youngster in elementary school, I had similarly miscalculated my bladder's capacity and had the dreaded "accident" on the bus ride home. Today, through the lens of personal experience, I understand that my father was probably also suffering one of the side effects of his Type I diabetes; I found myself struggling several years ago with my ability to gauge my bladder capacity until I got my Type II diabetes under control with medication.
Once we turned down County Street, the last leg before crossing the town line, my father was desperately trying to make it to his North Main Street clothing store, where he could make a hurried trip to the bathroom, or grab a replacement pair of pants off the racks if he didn't make it. But it was becoming clear he wasn't going to make it. I tried to convince him to just stop on the side of the road and let it hang -- there was next to no development on that street at the time and he could have easily hidden himself from view behind a tree -- but he was too embarrassed to stop and he paid the price for it before we made it to the center of Mansfield.
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Our 1963 VW Beetle
(I was 9 years old here).
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We just went home, where my father jumped out of the car and raced to the bathroom without saying a word. Sensing his embarrassment, I told him I'd clean up the car for him. As it turned out, I didn't have to; everything had been soaked up by his multiple layers of clothing.
Now, you may be asking me why I'd want to share that story. Why would you want to embarrass your father like that? Well, aside from the fact that my father passed in 2001, it was a story that we were able to laugh about later in our lives.
My father and I never really clicked in a sports sense. He did take me to Red Sox games for several years beginning in 1964, but probably more because I wanted to go than because he was interested in them. If you're looking for a "Field of Dreams" moment between us, keep looking. We didn't share a "Hey, Dad, want to have a catch?" relationship. On the rare occasions when we'd toss a baseball in the back yard, I'd end up teasing him unmercifully for throwing "like a girl" (yes, I used to toss that phrase around recklessly before I learned how well many girls can throw a ball).
And when it comes to football, he left his interest in the sport in a pool of blood at Fuller Field in 1935. Not until I started covering the Patriots and he could read my award-winning work in the local daily newspaper did he rekindle any interest in it.
But it struck us as funny many years later, that on the one day when we tried to have a bonding moment related to football in my youth, both Mother Nature and his bladder betrayed us. And strangely enough, it did bond us. It underscored his humanity.
My father was a good man, a loving father and a very good provider for his family. To his everlasting credit, he didn't mind at all if a momentary human weakness took him off a pedestal in the eyes of his young son. And I firmly believe that from that moment on, I looked at my father as less of an authoritarian ruler of a household, and more of a friend and a fellow human being, trying to find his way in the world -- and able to proceed on course, even with an occasional stumble.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
